4.5 stars, rounded. Leslie Jamison's writing is entirely masterful, and her thoughtfully researched essays in this collection were, as a collective whole, fascinating. I found the last section, which were the most personal stories, focusing on her own relationships, the most compelling and resonant (in particular, her essay discussing stepmothers in literature and culture versus her own experience as a stepmother was absolutely fascinating). Definitely a collection that isn't to be missed.

The most compelling and intelligent book of essays this year. I plan to gift Make It Scream, Make It Burn to several people in my life this holiday season.

(4 big stars, rounded up to 5 because one essay literally made me scream... in this AH, LESLIE YOUR WRITING IS KILLING ME sort of way, which was followed by me reading like three paragraphs over again out loud to soak in her genius.)

This is a solid collection of essays, to say the least. Some of them I want to revisit again. One or two I was like meh, but one or two meh when there are at least five or six that cut me deeply, it's still equals a stellar collection. Overall, I LOVED it.

Leslie Jamison is such a talented nonfiction writer. This set of essays is categorized around 3 categories, which explore Longing, Looking, and Dwelling. Jamison is at her best when she fuses an exploration of a topic with the personal (e.g., the portrayal of step-motherhood in literature and society and Jamison's own experience with step-motherhood) or explores individuals who might not otherwise be considered (e.g., people who feel a kinship with a special blue whale, those who live part of their lives in Second City, a museum dedicated to broken relationships). Only one of the pieces fell flat for me (one on James Agee's work that gives this collection its name).

Thanks to the author, Little Brown & Company, and NetGalley for a chance to review this forthcoming work in exchange for a review.

Leslie Jamison's new collection Make It Scream, Make It Burn takes a few essays to start cooking. I found "52 Blue," evidently a small classic already, hazy and meandering. "We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live Again" is promising but seems to cut off just when things get interesting. What is the half-baked "Layover Story" doing here?

Then comes the endlessly fascinating "Sim Life," a 30-page history of the virtual world Second Life. Told with a generous amount of input from the program's users, it's like the essay equivalent of Werner Herzog's mind-boggling documentary Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World. Both works succeed at, in astoundingly little time, grasping the enormity of the internet. From here on, the collection rarely dips from this high. The unassuming-at-first "No Tongue Can Tell," a column recounting Jamison's trip to a Met exhibition of Civil War photography, ends with a breathtaking hammer drop of a paragraph, easily the book's most memorable moment. In two later pieces, she continues grappling with James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and connects it to Annie Appel's ongoing photography project "The Mexico Journeys," in which she has followed and documented one family for 25 years now.

Sentence for sentence, this is every bit as strong as The Empathy Exams, and for me it noses ahead by playing more toward Jamison's strengths as an awe-inspirer.

Thank you very much to NetGalley and Little, Brown and Company for providing this ARC in exchange for this review and forthcoming blog coverage.

The thing that continues to draw me to Leslie Jamison's work is her unabashed curiosity. She takes these deep dives into things that on the surface are very banal or firmly in the realm of science and builds a bridge into her own emotional life and the way she perceives the world.

I am smitten with this new collection of essays, which covered a broad range of topics broken into three sections: "longing", "looking", and "dwelling". I found that many of the essays could have been placed in multiple categories and that the real narrative of the essay placement moved from the impersonal to the personal.

I loved essays like "52 Blue", which opens the collection and tells the story of a whale whose unique song has become popularized as a source of metaphor and art, and "We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live Again", an exploration into studies of reincarnation, but the essays I will take with me come later in the collection and speak from her deeply personal experiences.

"Daughter of a Ghost" is a personal essay that also examines the role that stepmothers have historically played in children's lives - both real and imagined. "Museum of Broken Hearts", the true standout of this collection for me, investigates the complex interactions that people have with objects from their past relationships and the private desire to make the past public. This essay had me underlining sentences (and full paragraphs) the most and I believe that this is the essay I will bring up most in future conversations, "I actually read an essay about this", that I can see myself returning to and thinking about for quite some time. The essays that close the collection are the strongest for me, so in that way the collection may be uneven, depending on how you look at it.

In all, Leslie Jamison is an expert at a particular kind of essay - she's not trying to be funny or to convince you of anything. She's trying to share her experiences, to define them for herself. Lucky for me, she and I share similar curiosities and I will never get tired of her lens, of how she turns life into art.

Thank you to Little Brown and NetGalley, who provided me with an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Leslie Jamison is rapidly becoming one of my favorite writers. The Empathy Exams was an astonishing collection of essays, all wide-ranging but built around a single idea. Her autobiographical look at addiction, The Recovering, is perhaps one of the best books on the subject I've ever encountered (as the child of alcoholic parents, I've read quite a few). And now her newest essay collection, 'Make It Scream, Make It Burn,' continues to capture so much about what I love in her writing--its range, its intimacy, its compassion, its resistance to pat conclusions about the human condition. This collection is less thematically cohesive than Empathy Exams; if that earlier volume was an album, this one is more of a mix tape, so some essays grabbed me more intensely than others, but overall it's a solid display of Jamison's immense talent.

Searingly honest and often uncomfortably intimate, this collection of non-fiction stories or “essays”, are elevated not only by the assured nature of Leslie Jamison’s writing, but also by how emotionally invested she becomes with her subjects.

In non-fiction, the trend is to be “once removed” from what you’re writing about, but not so here. Jamison is fully immersed in the telling. She’s the shadow of the photographer in every photo, her own personality, longings, obsessions and addictions seeping through, often with incredible results.

Though not every piece was as compelling as my favourites (52 Blue, We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live Again, Daughter of a Ghost, Museum of Broken Hearts), most – if not all – were blessed with Jamison’s rawness, her propensity for truth-telling, and her unflinching looks in the mirror. If her subjects are lonely or damaged or fraught with unseen hurts, well then, so is she. She’ll unwrap herself as surely as she unwraps them. This serves her better in stories where she can find a way in – in some, she still seems on the outside, trying to find a crack in the window.

In the best tales – mentioned above – there is a glowing ribbon of understanding. Jamison’s empathy and desperate need to connect are beacons throughout the book – evident in one story about children who remember past lives. Where most journalists were dismissive of the claims, Jamison sought to cast aside her own belief system, opinions, or any other attitude that might reveal she was biased or had pre-conceived ideas – to do so, she felt, would be foolish and quick to judge:

"It was more that I felt emotionally, spiritually and intellectually allergic to a certain disdainful tone that implied it knew better, that it understood what was possible and what wasn’t. It seemed arrogant to assume I understood much about consciousness itself – what it was, where it came from, or where it went once we were done with it."


Chased by her own demons – alcoholism, abandonment, guilt – Jamison tackles her subjects gently, peeling aside their armours and getting to the bloody truths with an unsparing eye and the brutality, the beauty, of language. Even as she shines the flashlight through the darkness, she seems to be saying, I can see you. You’re not alone. I want to know your story.

Come here, I will tell of it.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC in exchange for an honest review. I appreciate it!

***** Closer to publication date, review will be posted on Amazon, B&N, and my Twitter *****

Thank you to the publisher, via NetGalley, for providing me with an e-arc for review. This has in no way influenced my opinion.

This, like my experience with all essay collections, was an uneven ride. I really enjoyed a few of the essays: 52 Blue, Sim Life, Up in Jaffna, and The Museum of Broken Hearts were standouts for me, for example. Jamison's writing remains emotional and accessible, if not a long winded on a few of the pieces. How much she cares about the subjects of each of her essays leaps off the page - and you're sucked in, even if the topic wasn't something you were previously aware of, or would've thought you'd be interested in. If you've enjoyed her past work or have an interest in niche journalism, pick this up!